Errors – Have Some Faith in Magic

★★★★★

Album Review
by Chris Buckle
| 04 Jan 2012

Album title:
Have Some Faith in Magic

Artist:
Errors

Label:
Rock Action

Release date:
30 Jan

For their latest trick, Errors have produced their most impressive album thus far. Tusk is an impeccable introduction – bombastic and tight, its opening is a Richard Burton monologue-short of Jeff Wayne, its central melody a crystal-prog wonder. It’s one of their third album's boldest points of progression from past releases, though the echoing vocals that slink through single Magna Encarta also refresh the band’s palette.

It’s not the first time a human voice has entered Errors’ sphere – as far back as 2006's How Clean Is Your Acid House? EP, Terror Tricksarrived with vocoder over its glitches – but on Have Some Faith in Magic the typically instrumental quartet exercise their larynxes in a more sustained fashion. It’s a significant alteration, one with an attendant danger of homogenisation, but – in a manner comparable to Battles’ recent evolution – they make good on their promise to treat the vocals like any other instrument.

Despite these tweaks, Errors' strengths remain consistent, dextrously push-pulling the listener between dance floor and headphones, the latter to appreciate the invention on offer, the former to get lost in its folds. The pointillist-style artwork is nicely representative in this regard – intricately clever up-close, unfussy yet beautiful when surveyed as a whole: quite simply, magic.